Part 14 (1/2)

With that, and without another word, he pushed his face towards the plate and began to scoff the food.... It was pitiful to look at. He was losing his bread, and his fork, and groping for his gla.s.s all the time.... Poor soul! He just hadn't had the time to get used to it all yet.

After a short time, he spoke again:

”Do you know what's even worse? It's not being able to read the d.a.m.ned newspapers. You have to be in the trade to understand that....

Sometimes at night, when I am coming home, I buy one just for the smell of the fresh, moist paper, and newsprint.... It's so good! But there's not a soul willing to read it to me! My wife could, but she doesn't want to. She makes out that there are indecent things in the news items. Ah-ha! these old mistresses, once they marry you, there's no one more prudish. That Madame Bixiou has turned herself into a right little bigot--but only as far as it suits her!... It was she who wanted to me rub my eyes in Salette water. And then there was the blessed bread, the pilgrimages, the Holy Child, the Chinese herbal remedies, and G.o.d knows what else.... We're up to our necks in good works. And yet, it would be a real kindness to read the papers to me.... But there you are, there's no chance, she simply doesn't want to.... If my daughter was still at home, she would; but since I became blind, I've sent her to the Notre-Dame-des-Arts, so there'd be one less mouth to feed....

”Now there's another one sent to test me! She's only had nine years on earth and already she's had every imaginable illness... And miserable!

And ugly! Uglier than I am, if that's possible ... a real monster!...

What do you expect? I have never known how to face up to my responsibilities....

”Well, what good company I turned out to be, boring you with my family business. And what's it all got to do with you?... Come on, give me a bit more brandy. I'd better be off. When I leave here, I am off to the public information service and the ushers are not famed for their sense of humour. They're all retired teachers.”

I poured him some brandy. He sipped it and then seemed moved by something.... Suddenly, on a whim, I think, he got up, gla.s.s in hand, and briefly moved his blind, viper-like head around, with the amiable smile of someone about to speak, and then speaking in a strident voice, as if holding forth to a banquet for two hundred,

”To the arts! To literature! To the press!”

And there he stood, spouting a toast for fully ten minutes. It was the most wild, the most marvellous improvisation which his clown's brain could devise.

”Imagine a year's-end revue ent.i.tled _Collection of Letters of 186*_; about our literati, our gossip, our quarrels, all the idiocies of an eccentric world, a cesspool of ink, h.e.l.l in miniature, where you cut your own throat, disembowel yourself, rob yourself, and outtalk the bourgeoisie about interest rates and money. Where they let you starve to death better than anywhere else; all our cowardice and woes; old baron T... of la Tombola going away with a _tut-tut_ to the Tuileries with his begging bowl and his flowery clothes. Then there's the year's deaths, the burial announcements, the never changing funeral oration of the delegate: the _Dearly missed! Poor dear!_ over some unlucky soul who was refused the means to bury himself; the suicides; and those gone insane. Imagine all that, told, itemised, and gesticulated by an orator of genius, and you will then have some idea of what Bixiou's improvisation was about.”

The toast over, his gla.s.s empty, he asked me what the time was, and left in a wild mood, without so much as saying goodbye.... I don't know how Monsieur Duruy's ushers were affected by his visit that morning; but I do know that after that awful blind man had left, I have never felt so sad, so bad, in the whole of my life.

The very sight of ink sickened me, my pen horrified me, I wanted to distance myself from it all, to run away, to see trees, to feel something good, real.... Good G.o.d! The hatred, the venom, the unquenchable need to belittle it all, to befoul everything! Oh! That wretched man....

Then I furiously paced up and down in my room still hearing the giggling disgust he had shown for his daughter. Right then, I felt something under my feet, near where the blind man had been sitting.

Bending down, I recognised his wallet, a thick, worn wallet, with split corners, which he always carried with him and laughingly called his pocket of venom.

This wallet, in our world, was as famous as Monsieur de Girardin's cartoons. Rumour has it that there are some awful things in it.... I was soon to discover the truth of it. The old over-stuffed wallet had burst open as it fell and the papers inside fell onto the carpet; I had to collect them one by one....

There was a package of letters written on decorated paper, all beginning, _My dear Daddy,_ and signed, _Celine Bixiou at the Children of Mary hospital_.

There were old prescriptions for childhood ailments: croup, convulsions, scarlet fever and measles.... (the poor little girl hadn't missed out on a single one of them!)

Finally, there was a hidden envelope from which came a two or three curly, blond hairs, which might have come from the girl's bonnet. There was some writing on it in a large, unsteady hand; the handwriting of a blind man:

_Celine's hair, cut the 13th May, the day she went to that h.e.l.l_.

That's all there was in Bixiou's wallet.

Let's face it, Parisians, you're all the same; disgust, irony, evil laughter at vicious jokes. And what does it all amount to?...